Disagreements and Platitudes
Maurice adjusted the blind a little to open up and see the hazy light outside.
“Ukraine should never have gotten rid of their nuclear arsenal”, he declared to his guest who was reclining in the hidden recesses of his friends’ living quarters.
“My god, another one in favour of nuclear capabilities. May I recall the words of first Ukrainian president Leonid Kravchuk1 who signed the Lisbon Protocol. He splendidly summed up three good reasons to do so:
- Clinton demanded it.
- After 1998 they would become unsafe, and only Russia would be able to upgrade them.
- And a small detail: All the nukes were aimed at the United States!”
“Conventional weapons will only get you so far. They can’t deter autocrats.. oh, pity, I just used a label. Putin is a war criminal, how about that, I seem to be a plethora of labels today!
Here is an anti-label on the other hand. Why don’t you people stop with the “narrative” bullshit. There is no narrative. If the Russian army had not committed warcrimes, Russia would not be the subject of world wide condemnation today. Simple as that.”
“Any framing of the situation is real in its own right. But you refuse to accept that you could have chosen any number of alternative versions of reality.”
“Such as?”
“For one: Let the human rights courts handle it like any other crime. Countless organisations claim to be gathering evidence in large numbers. And trust me, the courts are eager to convict.”
“And you still forget that more important than justice is standing united!”
“Yes! Standing united really does make a difference! It makes mockery of justice! Have you ever read a transcript from a court room? Trust me, especially your idea of justice has little resemblance with the law’s idea of justice. For one thing there is always two sides to a story. Unlike the mindless masses the judge has to sit through the procedures and hear both.
And dare I even mention the folly in judging a party to a conflict before the trial has ended?”
“But I on the other hand maintain that the courts make a mockery of justice if they don’t judge according to public will. That’s democracy.”
“Spoken like a true democratic patriot. Whatever the hell that is.”
“It means my ethical compass is intact.”
“Narratives are simplistic reductions, always. Here is a childishly simplistic reduction: ‘I would not have hated the Russians had they not committed warcrimes’.
Want more? ‘All Russian soldiers rape children’, ‘All accusations of warcrimes against Ukrainians are false’. Want more? Just watch TV.”
“Then the same can be said of equally stupid statements such as ‘Putin is innocent’, ‘Ukraine are nazis’, ‘the children of Ukraine deserved it’ or what do you think?”
“Precisely! Let’s try stepping out of the present for a moment and into the past for a change.”
Interviews and Statistics
The guest handed him an iPad that showed an interview in Ukrainska Pravda with Leonid Kravchuk from June 2018. Luckily it was already machine translated. The headline read “Leonid Kravchuk: Putin needs to sit down with Poroshenko at the negotiating table”
“Compare the tone in this interview with the new black and white language. There is no doubt that Kravchuk is patriotic.”
The war gave Ukrainians the opportunity to assess Russia as an aggressor. This is a fact. Therefore, all the efforts that are being made today both in the energy system and in the political, social, and cultural fields are aimed at gradually separating from Russia.
“… and yet look at this quote:”
I know that without the influence of the West, we will not be able to solve this issue. But Putin needs to sit down at the negotiating table, because their influence on Donbas is extremely large. We need to sit down with Poroshenko.
“So an ex-president of Ukraine was more pragmatic than western media ever managed to be. We have without exception maintained that Russia is 100% responsible for Donbas. And yet this guy talks about Putin’s strong influence over what are basically Ukrainian citizens. He wants Ukraine to develop in on its own terms into something far removed from Russia. But based on the free will of Ukrainians. He expresses nothing that indicates a desire to halt the development of the entire country over a region that doesn’t even want to be a part of it.”
[Question: what should be the policy regarding Donetsk and Luhansk regions?] Well, not the same as before. I will quote Honchar, although I do not fully support it. In his diaries it is written: “In order for Ukraine to develop calmly and abundantly, we must cut off the cancerous tumor - Donbas.”
Maurice is quiet for a while as he is reading through the interview.
“Aha, Kravchuk also says: ”
She has been fighting for 150 years, she does not know any other way, except to rape by force and pressure, to lie on top of someone. This is nature.
“Yes! He does. He is not supposed to love Russia! That is the biggest unseen lie the war mongers got away with, the hidden false assumption lurking over the heads of any participant in any debate: That if you can’t prove they love each other, you have implicitly proven the validity of the hatred and the war.
They are indeed different and Ukraine absolutely wants to escape the weight of their neighbour. But Kravchuk knows not to idolise his own beliefs. That is the least amount of humility that is required of each one of us. So you seek a compromise, you negotiate a tolerable solution.”
“All that was before the war. Everything changed when Russia invaded.”
“That right there is another one they got away with. A complete lack of moral obligation to the reality leading up to the war. The irony is that even the Ukrainians themselves were more nuanced then we ever were:”
He pointed at his laptop screen which showed a page on dif.org.ua.
Poll conducted in June, 2019 regarding Donbas
The majority of the population - 49% - believes that “for the sake of peace, it is worth agreeing to compromises, but not all of them.” This opinion prevails in all regions: in the Central (51%), Eastern (50%), Southern (48%), Western (44%).
“If you read through this survey, you can really see how emotionally and politically complicated the situation becomes. All parties would have to make sacrifices to settle on something they could tolerate. Just look at the enourmous differences across all of the country, not just west vs east.”
| Compromise for the sake of peace? | West | Center | South | East |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Peace at any cost, agree to anything | 8.8 | 20.9 | 30.3 | 24.6 |
| Accept some, not all compromises | 43.7 | 51.1 | 48.3 | 50.3 |
| Peace can only come through winning the war | 28.4 | 16.4 | 8.3 | 13.1 |
| Hard to say | 19.2 | 11.6 | 13.5 | 12.0 |
“And also note that even in the east, there were a huge amount of disagreement to granting special status in the constitution.
This was never a simple conflict.”
| Acceptable to end war by enshrining special status to Donetsk and Lugansk in the constitution | West | Center | South | East |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acceptable | 11.2 | 26.6 | 43.1 | 44.9 |
| Unacceptable | 64.2 | 51.4 | 39.4 | 40.9 |
| Hard to answer | 24.6 | 22.1 | 17.5 | 14.2 |
Closing Words
We leave our two so-so friends here, as we all sadly know this story cannot ever come to an end. In all likelyhood all parties in all conflicts are justified in their positions. But perhaps we also forget that no peace ever existed without its participants accepting a wide buffer zone of acceptance and forgiveness. We live with the fact that our neighbours are different and allow them to be so. And in reality, so do they.
/PARADOX
Links & References
https://archive.md/IF78f#selection-5351.57-5351.105
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Ukrainian Presidents:
↩︎Office Name 1991 - 1994 Leonid Kravchuk 1994 - 2005 Leonid Kuchma 2005 - 2010 Viktor Yuschenko 2010 - 2014 Viktor Yanukovych 2014 - 2014 Oleksandr Turchynov 2014 - 2019 Petro Poroshenko 2019 - Volodomyr Zelenskyy